Performance Studies and the Enhancement of Theatre Studies

Abstract

The academic discipline of theatre studies holds a fairly recent position among such disciplines, having been essentially created and developed during the past century. Much of that time it has been engaged in a struggle, sometimes benign and sometimes bitter, to establish and police its boundaries and on occasion, simply to justify its continued existence. Normally located within the broader field of the humanities, it generally held a lesser position among them, both in the size of its faculty and in the esteem in which its research was held. In large part this was due to the fact that creative work in general, not easily accommodating the standard scholarly methods of appraisal that had been developed elsewhere in the humanities, was thus often viewed as less rigorous, but even among the arts theatre generally held a lesser position. The long-standing Western anti-theatrical prejudice, not nearly so widespread nor so deeply embedded culturally in the case of the visual arts or music, also worked against the establishment of theatre as a fully respectable academic pursuit.